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Former Afghan women's soccer captain kicking down barriers in Toronto

By Anna Bianca RoachSpecial to the Star

Sun., June 18, 2017

For a woman who didn’t let Afghanistan’s conservatism or public threats hold her back from achieving unprecedented athletic success, the idea of ascending Africa’s highest mountain is simply another life goal to conquer.

This month, footballer Zahra Mahmoodi will climb Mount Kilimanjaro, and she’ll top that achievement in a most appropriate way: with a soccer game near the summit to help raise awareness about equality and opportunity for women in sport.

Zahra Mahmoodi, seen at the Right to Play program at Evergreen Brickworks in Toronto, says when she was young, "I couldn't imagine myself playing soccer." (Vince Talotta / Toronto Star)

Zahra Mahmoodi began learning the game as a child, when her father started a soccer ball workshop in their house in Iran. In a small room at night, she started developing soccer skills. (Supplied)

Mahmoodi is, after all, the former captain of Afghanistan’s first national women’s soccer team and one of the country’s first professional female athletes. The 27-year-old, who now calls Toronto home, first learned the game on the sidelines, watching boys play in the streets. Forbidden to participate because she was a girl, Mahmoodi practised in the dark of night.

Today, Mahmoodi is an athlete ambassador for Right to Play, a Canadian organization that works to promote community building and resilience through sports. One recent afternoon at Evergreen Brick Works, she gleefully coached children from across Greater Toronto as part of a Right to Play event. She sees the empowerment it fosters as a meaningful catalyst for change.

“Even if hundreds of people say you can’t play soccer … one person says that ‘No, you can,’ they believe in you — it really means something to you,” she says from the sidelines, smiling when either team scores. “It makes you believe.”

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Her enthusiasm is infectious.

“It was actually really fun,” says one of the participants, Muna Ahmed, 13, of Etobicoke. “I’m not much of a sports person, so to have her teach me was huge.”

Muna, a student at Elmbank Junior Middle Academy, now plans on becoming a teen leader with Right to Play next year. “It hasn’t only increased my leadership, but also my courage to do more things.”

When Mahmoodi hears this, she beams. “That’s what happened in the Afghanistan national team. We were the first kids who played — then after us, there were new players. They wanted us to show them how we overcame our challenges, how we convinced our families, how we developed skills … Now many new kids in Afghanistan play soccer, and they look to the other kids who played before them.”

When Mahmoodi was a kid growing up in Iran, the only players she had to look up to were male — either the members of her beloved Manchester United she watched on TV or the boys who played in the streets of her hometown.

Born in 1990 in Shahriar, just west of Tehran, Mahmoodi was a child of refugees — her parents left Afghanistan in 1975 after facing discrimination for being Hazara and Shia Muslim. Iran granted few rights to Afghans fleeing persecution.

Zahra Mahmoodi began learning the game as a child, when her father started a soccer ball workshop in their house in Iran. In a small room at night, she started developing soccer skills. (Supplied)

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“I couldn’t imagine myself playing soccer, because when your parents are struggling to find food and you don’t have proper clothes to go to school … it’s not something you really want to think about.”

But in Grade 5, her school opened a new handball field. Mahmoodi, then 10, found a ball and talked some of her friends into playing soccer with her. The games were short-lived: teachers forbade the girls from playing the sport, deeming it unfit for women.

Mahmoodi feared this would be an end to her dreams of playing.

“But suddenly my father decided to make soccer balls to make money,” she recalls. “We turned one of our rooms into a small workshop. We started sewing soccer balls with our hands. During the day we’d work in that workshop, and during the night me and my sister would have to go pump the soccer balls, and package them.

“That time was the only time that it was me and the soccer balls … So I started playing, staying late all the time, working and playing. Most of the soccer skills I know I learned inside that small room.”

In late 2001, the Taliban were driven from power in Afghanistan by a U.S.-led force. Afghan refugees in Iran were being encouraged to repatriate. With the Iranian government increasingly rescinding refugee rights to education, Mahmoodi’s family returned to Kabul in 2004.

Back in Afghanistan, they faced the fact that sports were taboo. Throughout the rule of the Taliban, the city’s main stadium had been used for public executions, and was now more associated with the horrors of the regime than anything else. Like many forms of entertainment, sports of any kind were deemed “un-Islamic” and banned during that period; and though the Taliban had been ousted, the ideology was still deeply ingrained.

“I dreamed of playing soccer at a time when no soccer team existed in Afghanistan,” says Mahmoodi. For men, it had been years since soccer had been safe to play; for women, playing soccer was considered “unladylike,” and was disallowed even before the Taliban.

But for Mahmoodi, being back in Afghanistan meant she no longer had to worry, as she had in Iran, about the precariousness of her family’s refugee status. “We started going to school, and I started making friends. Then I said, ‘OK, this is my own country. I have freedom … So maybe here I can start playing soccer.’”

With the same determination she had brought to her elementary school handball field, she quickly taught her friends the game. They played informally for a few years, and then in 2007, the Afghan Football Federation recruited Mahmoodi and a few other girls from schools throughout Kabul for the first Afghanistan National Women’s Football Team.

But even with the recognition from the national federation, the women’s team faced challenges. For a while, the women had to resort to using a field that was actually a helipad for the International Security Assistance Force, NATO’s local force, located in Kabul’s most dangerous area. “Sometimes these girls would come from very long distances, often walking … because they couldn’t afford the bus. After passing the security checks, they would sit there, and watch the helicopters come. And all the practice time was gone like that, and they had to go back.”

Mahmoodi was honoured at the 2013 Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards in Louisville, Ky., for work toward gender equality in Afghanistan. (Supplied)

As Afghan women and athletes, it was this adversity that drew them together. “That was the best time of our lives, because these girls would come from different backgrounds. We played together like sisters,” she says, with a smile that is both sweet and defiant.

“Just existing and being a voice … that was enough for us. We weren’t looking for championships. We just wanted to be there to show the world: These girls, they know their rights, and they’re fighting for their rights. And they won’t stay at home.”

Her instinct for leadership and support was recognized and she became the first captain of the national team in 2009. She also founded and coached the Afghanistan Under-14 girls team, and under her guidance as the head of the Women’s Committee of the Afghanistan Football Federation, girls’ soccer proliferated: By 2013, there were 16 women’s soccer clubs and more than 300 players.

The national team garnered global attention and Mahmoodi was often at the centre of it. At the 2012 South Asian Football Federation Games, the Afghans defeated Pakistan 4-0 in one of several positive results. In 2013, as one of a handful of female Afghan entrepreneurs and leaders, she met U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry when he visited Kabul and made a plea for help to build a dedicated pitch where women and girls could play soccer.

Shortly thereafter, Mahmoodi was announced as a winner of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award, alongside the likes of former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and Free the Children co-founder Craig Kielburger.

But even as this was happening, the political situation in Afghanistan was fraught. It had been more than a decade since the American invasion, and ethnic tensions were rising. The targeting of Hazaras had never stopped altogether, but was now increasing in frequency and violence. “There were so many kidnappings,” Mahmoodi recalls. “People from my tribe, they were kidnapped and killed and tortured.”

Mahmoodi, who was known through news coverage of the national team, became a target of threats, for being a Hazara female athlete.

“Many people didn’t want me to be there, the face of the Afghan national team, because I come from a minority that are still being committed genocide against in Afghanistan and Pakistan — the worst crimes happen against my tribe.”

A few months later, when she travelled to Louisville, Ky., to receive the Muhammad Ali award, her family warned her against returning home.

“I really wanted to go back because my father was suffering from cancer, and my family was in a very bad situation,” she says, but her family insisted she stay for a while.

American friends offered to help her apply for refuge in Canada. “Canada has a very good reputation for being welcoming,” she says, adding that she never totally felt that way in Iran or Afghanistan, having been a minority. “I hoped that this time I might find a place that I could call home.”

Mahmoodi gives pointers to Muna Ahmed, 13, as part of the Right to Play program. Muna, self-described as "not much of a sports person," has found the experience inspiring. (Vince Talotta / Toronto Star)

Mahmoodi did find a home in Toronto but it didn’t come easy: soon after she arrived in Canada in 2013, as her paperwork was being processed and she couldn’t leave the country, her father died. “I really wanted to go and see him, but I never could.”

To deal with her displacement and loss, she began searching for a community to be part of, and she found it in Right to Play. Starting there was a turning point, and allowed her to continue the kind of work she started in Kabul. She has already built up local fans.

“I’ve seen her talk to kids, but also to a roomful of lawyers,” says Ty Greene, who co-ordinates partnerships with Right to Play, remarking on Mahmoodi’s exceptional kind of casual confidence. “The reaction is always the same. It’s amazement. It’s awe at her personal power.”

Mahmoodi has also decided to pursue a degree in international development at the University of Guelph.

Between studying and Right to Play, her plate is full. But as always, she’s still moving to advance women’s rights and access to sports.

Which is why she’s determined to climb the 4,900 metres of Kilimanjaro between June 18 and 26, as part of the Equal Playing Field — Altitude Football Project.

The project aims to expand access to sports by co-ordinating training clinics in countries like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, as well as demonstrate that, even though funding is scarce for women’s teams, the talent is there.

“Women are coming from over 20 countries, over 13 national teams,” explains one of the organizers, Erin Blankenship. “These women have played the World Cup and the Olympics. They’re some of the best players in the world.”

Mahmoodi’s former teammate Hajar Abulfzl will join her and the rest of group who will battle it out with a match at the top of the mountain in Tanzania, hoping to set a Guinness World Record for the highest-elevation soccer game in history.

Mahmoodi is nonchalant when she talks about breaking the world record; it’s the same straightforward attitude she had at 10 on a handball field in Shahriar, at 16 on a helipad in Kabul. When she talks about what it means for women, it’s clear she’s not talking about competition: she’s talking about solidarity, and that’s what soccer has meant to her forever.

“When you see everybody is against you, all the men, you really want to fight back. But you can’t fight back alone, you need your whole team.”

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